Rochester Memory Hardware Error Research Project

Overview

Our research focuses on the characteristics of memory hardware errors and their implications on software systems. A plethora of research works can be found on memory fault tolerance. Often times researchers use accelerated tests in their controlled environments to collect data. We have taken a different approach to conduct field tests that monitor computers in real time and record the actual errors happening on them.

Memory errors can be categorized as soft errors and hard errors. Soft errors are also known as transient errors, which refer to those errors that are caused by environmental factors only and would not have lasting effects on memory hardware. Hard errors (or permanent errors) include those that are due to real hardware defects. We discovered that in each of our measured environments, the soft error rates are orders of magnitude lower than previously reported on a per Mbit basis. In the server farm at Ask.com, we have found quite a few hard errors. We made some error rate/pattern analysis in our USENIX'07 and HotDep'07 papers. Our recent USENIX'10 paper uses the collected data to predict the whole memory system failure rate/pattern given different ECC schemes and maintenance strategies.

Publications

Project Members

Xin Li @Google
Kai Shen@U of Rochester
Michael Huang@U of Rochester
Lingkun Chu @ask.com

And also we'd like to thank Tao Yang and Alex Wang at ask.com that have made this research and the data release possible.

Contact

Kai Shen (kshen@cs.rochester.edu)

Link

We are a participant of USENIX computer failure data repository. You can find more failure data in addition to ours following this link.

Data download and format description

Our raw data file can be found in here. This file is of a csv format, which can be recognized by all major software for data analysis purposes.

We give a brief description of the fields. For more information, please contact me.

Method

Some necessary detailed facts you should notice: